


Escape

by themysteryvanishing



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Episode: s03e06 The Real World, Ficlet, Gen, Mental Health Issues, introspective, rabbit hole thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-13
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:41:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28052613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themysteryvanishing/pseuds/themysteryvanishing
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3





	Escape

No thoughts.

Head empty.

Just the incessant droning in her left ear and the way it obliterated everything up to and including coherent thought, as she lay on the cold floor.

She was missing something.

Damned if she could think for one moment what it was.

With every other avenue of thought decidedly unavailable, she moved on to the only thing of which she was capable of being aware: the blaring siren in her head. Klaxon-like, almost. Familiar.

She’d been taking her meds—finally—with a respectable enough degree of consistency, if not to satisfy this so-called Doctor Fletcher then to satisfy her realization that life, lately, had begun feeling a bit rote again. Pointlessly repetitive. And it was from that overwhelming sense of helplessness, combined with her perennially problematic tendency to overthink things in private, that, only after _much_ therapy, she had learned could key open the tiny box in her brain where she kept her willingness to admit she needed help.

As it were, one of the meds that was meant to help course-correct her mental state just so happened to make her left ear ring. She didn’t know if she liked that better or worse than the vertigo.

Oh, right. The vertigo.

Hence, the cold floor.

For something that was meant to improve one’s quality of life, the new drug regiment sure was making her work for it.

Though, she supposed, Doctor Fletcher had pointed out, on more than one occasion, that that was kind of the whole point.

It was a point that sucked, nevertheless, and she began to wonder if this new therapist of hers had purposefully failed to mention that she, Elizabeth Weir, someone who never in her life had needed to take any of the acronymic assortment of drugs meant to correct a woeful lack of serotonin or its reuptake, might have a propensity for experiencing losing her footing while standing perfectly still, and be bordering on _feral_ from the inability to hear over herself.

Probably hadn’t wanted to scare her off.

Her new diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder told her that was a fair assessment.

None of this changed the fact that she was still on the floor, however, which itself was still listing oddly to the right, and that the roaring in her head made her want to bash her skull against the tile.

Hence the antidepressants.

She closed her eyes for a moment in an attempt to shut off her brain’s desperate efforts to center via a visual point of reference. Intellectually, she knew she wasn’t moving, but still, she swayed internally, like the gentle rolling of the floating docks in Atlantis as the watery horizon stretched to infinity…

Her eyes shot open.

She was still on the floor of her dark room in Willoughby State Hospital, outside D.C. On…Earth.

Elizabeth looked around, her gaze falling on a bright yellow laminated sign: PLEASE CALL. DON’T FALL.

She scoffed, tempted to roll her eyes, but ultimately dissuaded by the enduring motion sickness.

She wiggled her toes experimentally, satisfied that her limbs obeyed, despite the protesting that continued in her head.

Doctor Beckett would have had a few choice words for her upon learning she’d ignored protocol and decided to quite literally roll out of bed—

But.

Come _on._ Doctor Beckett. He _had_ to be real, no matter Fletcher’s insistence that such a person did not exist.

Because who _else_ had been there to inspect her neck and windpipe after Niam had nearly crushed her throat in the backseat of the puddle-jumper? That is, after the team—god, the _team_ —had in _sis_ ted she visit the infirmary upon returning to Atlantis, despite the late hour? Had insisted to her that she would’ve recommended the same to them had roles been reversed?

Hadn’t that all happened just a few days ago?

How the hell could her brain make _any_ of that up, like Fletcher said, in response to the trauma of a car accident? She liked to think she had a decent penchant for recall, and no way was Simon dead. Living on Earth, maybe, and living apart from her now, but not dead. She would’ve remembered that.

Healthy though her imagination was, particularly where annoying politicians and diplomats were concerned when they insisted on dragging out negotiations, Elizabeth would swear up and down that seeing Simon, bleeding, lifeless, limp, amidst broken glass in the crushed interior of their car had never entered her mind. Could never.

The thought of it made her almost gag with fear, unhelped by the dizzying imbalance of her inner ear. It was just like her first trip through the gate. Re-atomization tended to do that to a person…

But it shouldn’t have made her feel that way. Shouldn’t have reminded her of something that evidently did not exist.

But then, she supposed, wouldn’t that be exactly how someone diagnosed with delusional psychosis would reason with themselves?

Elizabeth sighed and rubbed her eyes. Perhaps her head was not as empty as she wanted it to be, right about now. It was exhausting.

Moving slowly, she dragged herself to her feet, which by now were numb with cold. The pins and needles rolled up her legs like static. With effort, she pulled herself into the bedside chair and slumped into it, wrapping her blue robe tighter around her shoulders.

The lilting of her surroundings gradually began to subside. It was night, and no orderlies would be stopping by her room until morning, unless she banged loudly enough on the door for them. And the door was locked, so it wasn’t like she could go for a stroll to get her thoughts realigned.

There was no escape from this strange world that insisted on existing to her. And if she fought too hard, well, she’d already been physically overpowered and subdued with sedatives more than once, to her immense displeasure, and was not keen on doing so again.

Maybe Doctor Fletcher was right, then. That readjusting would take time, and that her brain really had attempted to shield itself from the trauma of the car accident by knitting an impossible sci-fi reality together in her head. Maybe the memories she had of this nonproliferation treaty she _thought_ she had successfully brokered, but now apparently had been in the _middle_ of brokering when she had supposedly collapsed were some odd, protracted déjà vu, an imaginative, but admittedly useful glimpse into how she should proceed going forward, in order to successfully navigate it.

“ _Elizabeth…”_

A whisper emanated from her closet, its cracked door slightly ajar, allowing a strange, bright blue light to filter in.

She bolted upright.

That was John’s voice. It _had_ to be.

Elizabeth softly padded over to her closet. Breathless, heart pounding, she gripped the cold handle with a trembling hand.

The door swung open.

The watery event horizon, the uniquely teal one she knew, in her heart of hearts, belonged to her Atlantean stargate, shimmered at the closet’s threshold. All she had to do was cross it.

She took a deep breath and stepped into the light.


End file.
